Carl Westman
Westman designed the Court House in Stockholm and the Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg and was a model for a simple, craft-based domestic architecture inspired by the English Arts and Crafts movement.
Carl Westman was born in Uppsala in 1866. He trained as an architect at the Royal Institute of Technology and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm and early in his career worked for other architects in the historicist tradition. In the 1890s he travelled in Europe and was strongly impressed by the English Arts and Crafts movement, with its emphasis on craftsmanship, simple materials and functional plans in houses. He was also engaged in the artistic and social debate around 1900 and connected to circles around artists such as Carl Larsson. Together with Östberg, Tengbom and others he taught at the independent school of architecture known as the Klara School.
Westman’s early reputation rested on villas in Djursholm and Saltsjöbaden, where he combined English planning ideas with Swedish traditions of log construction and render. The Swedish Society of Medicine’s building in Stockholm, completed around 1906, is regarded as an early major work of National Romanticism. His best-known building is the Court House on Kungsholmen, 1909–1915, a brick castle with a tower that takes up features from Vadstena Castle and other Vasa-era buildings, but whose plan is rationally organised around light courts. In Gothenburg he designed the Röhsska Museum of Design and Crafts, opened in 1916, in dark brick. His formal language is based on genuine materials, honest craftsmanship, clear volumes and sparing, well-placed details.
Westman died in 1936. He was one of the architects who most clearly championed the National Romantic ideal that architecture should be grounded in Swedish tradition and materials, but without copying older styles literally. His villas became a model for Swedish owner-occupied housing and for a simple, craft-based domestic architecture that lived on well into the 20th century. The Court House in Stockholm, which still houses courts, is seen together with Östberg’s City Hall as a major work of the city’s National Romanticism. Westman’s interest in plans, light and everyday life also pointed towards the social ambitions that later became central to Swedish functionalism and the housing policy of the Swedish welfare state.